Light in the darkness

Living in the light is living in confidence. We can see where we are going, and we know we will arrive at our destination. There is no “we might make it.” We will experience eternal life in heaven with the Lord! How can we be confident of heaven? Check out today’s passage.

To introduce this devotional, I wanted to show all the different decisions that make life complex. There are multiple choices for everything from washers and dryers to tires for your car. Since you may not be in the market for a washer or dryer, and your tires are just fine, I decided to see how many brands of jeans there are. I found a site that provided the complete list of jean brands listed in alphabetical order. I stopped counting at one hundred brands. I was only at “C”! I didn’t have it in me to count jean brands starting with “D” all the way to “Z.”

Why did God put you on this earth? What’s your purpose? Some people live their entire lives trying to figure out what their entire life was supposed to be about. They come to the end wondering where they should have started. It’s not that they didn’t live well. Many have a stack of achievements. They can explain what they did and how they did it; they just can’t explain the “why.”

When an angel appears, you can bet that something amazing is going to happen! The amazing certainly took place when the angel Gabriel told Zechariah that he would be having a son. For Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth, that dream had died long ago. In fact, because of Zechariah’s unbelief, he was unable to speak a word until his son was born. Then, he broke out in a song of praise about the one who would prepare the way for Jesus.

Most of us are afraid of the dark—the absence of light. That’s where chaos, fear, disillusionment, and anxiety reside. It’s the place where the unknown lives. What is waiting for us…hiding from us…in the darkness? It paralyzes. We can’t move forward in the darkness. But here is the good news—the believers’ light is always shining.

“Be a light!” That’s what Beth Ann Schaeber said to her boys every day. Before she dropped them off at a friend’s house or their sporting event or when they walked out the door to go to school, “Be a light!” was the last thing they heard. They responded, “Shine bright!” Beth Ann knew that she was sending her kids into a dark world. She knew that they had been called out of darkness into God’s marvelous light to reflect the light of Jesus. The apostle Paul gave us the same challenge.

Temptation comes from three sources: The world. The flesh. The devil (Ephesians 2:1-3). While all three of these sources are involved in temptation, one will lead the way. Today, let’s focus on the times when the world takes the lead.

The apostle Paul’s life was not some ivory tower professorial existence spewing forth classroom theories and then retreating to his office to read another book. He lived in the real world, learning from real-life experiences. And there, he learned that God provides exactly what we need for whatever he is calling us to do. Paul learned this through experience. And so do we.

One writer captures our need to trust God when he writes, “You’re a soul made by God, made for God, and made to need God, which means you were not made to be self-sufficient.” Trusting in ourselves, our achievements, and our accomplishments is a losing proposition. Great men and women of God were people of faith. Abraham trusted God’s leading, even when he didn’t know where he was going.